100 years since Balfour

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, in which the British promised to give away a land that doesn’t belong to them, with total disregard to the indigenous people living on that land. Well, it wasn’t really “total” disregard, there was this one line about “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” but as history proved it, these lofty concerns were nothing more than empty words. Despite hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being exiled from their homeland with the creation of Israel, Palestinians eventually recognized Israel and sought a homeland in a mere ⅕ of historic Palestine, namely the areas Israel illegally occupies today. 100 years after the initiation of Western support for the creation of the state of Israel, the struggle for the creation of more modest homeland for indigenous Palestinians remains under assault.